Contemporary yoga is popularly represented in various media by a fit, white woman. Yoga Journal is a magazine recognized by many as an industry cornerstone and an institution in and of itself. It represents the distinctive face of yoga. By analyzing the visual and textual content of the Yoga Journal magazine covers, from its first issue in 1975 to issue 313, we describe the produced and consumed portrait of yoga. By focusing on the cover themes, together with the objects and (...) persons depicted, we recognize three phases of development that have contributed to the understanding of the changing image of yoga in the media. While, in the initial phase, yoga was represented as a mystical and mysterious spiritual discipline that originated in the Orientalized East, in the later phase, it was depicted first as a global and universal phenomenon and then as a mainstream everyday fitness regime. Yoga’s depiction in the last phase is compatible with the scholarly representation of contemporary yoga as posture and body centered, but not with its earlier depictions. We found that in its mature phase, the yoga body, which is criticized for its lack of inclusiveness, emerged to become omnipresent. We conclude that the newly formed face of yoga is problematic, both for its female readers, who are encouraged to conform to a unique body type, and also for the yoga community, which encounters an appearance-based restriction of access. (shrink)

As terms, “Yoga” and “Zen” are as ubiquitous as they are banal. They float, freely, empty of any real meaning. Just about anything could be, Zen; in the same way that, just about anything could be, Yoga. In a closed loop, one might even define “Yoga” as “like Zen” or “Zen” to be a form of “Yoga.” However, in various ways, they are forged into a new hybrid. The marketing of syncretic, yoga-inflected Buddhist temple tourist options in and around Kyoto, (...) Japan, demonstrates how “Zen+Yoga” hybrids have become trans-glocal phenomena stretching between London and Sydney. Why does the Zen+Yoga hybrid seem to receive less criticism than other X+Yoga hybrids, such as Goat+Yoga, Beer+Yoga, SUP+Yoga, Death Metal+Yoga, Dog+Yoga, and, to a lesser extent, Hot+Yoga? A significant part of the Zen+Yoga hybrid’s ability to heretically seal itself from criticism is due to the institutionalized religious capital that schools of Zen Buddhism have. Even though the other X+Yoga hybrids rely on similar discursive and haptic logics, they are unconstrained by tradition and institution, unlike Zen. While all hybrids are novel branding attempts for attention from within a thoroughly saturated wellness tourism market, syncretic X+Yoga hybrids are not new. Neither are they universally accepted as heretical cultural appropriations. The common assumption regarding the commensurability of Zen and Yoga practices at epistemological, ontological, and soteriological levels is challenged. As well as, the social, political, and economic realities of tourism and temples are analyzed. This is based on 2 years of ethnographic and specific media content analysis regarding Japan’s yogascapes. This paper focuses the discussion on Tera Yoga. (shrink)